[Osmf-talk] Trademark Policy

[Andy Robinson]

Timely in my view. I've always felt a little uncomfortable for instance that
OSMGB[1], which is a great resource and I don’t wish to discourage it, looks
at face value a bit too "official" when it clearly is not. Better guidelines
that help third parties associate yet differentiate themselves with/from the
official elements of the project would help ensure nobody beyond the project
is misled.

Cheers
Andy

[1] http://www.osmgb.org.uk/


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Frederik Ramm [mailto:frederik at remote.org]
> Sent: 20 December 2012 10:42
> To: osmf-talk at openstreetmap.org
> Subject: [Osmf-talk] Trademark Policy
> 
> All,
> 
>     one thing that the OSMF is likely to decide on in the coming year is a
policy
> that governs the use of our trademarks.[*]
> 
> A typical trademark policy looks like this:
> 
> "Use of our name/logo/... is permitted for the following cases: ... In all
other
> cases you require explicit permission from us."
> 
> and this will often be accompanied by an informal/unwritten custom about
> when and under what conditions such an "explicit permission" will usually
be
> granted.
> 
> In a crowdsourced project like ours we have tons of individuals using our
> name all the time, and in most cases we *want* (or even require) them to
> use it. There have been a few isolated cases in the past where we
(politely)
> asked someone to rename his iPhone App because it sounded too "official",
> or where asked someone to let us have a named page they had created in
> the social media space, but neither the positive nor the negative cases
are
> nailed down in any kind of policy.
> 
> I would like to invite the readers of this list to discuss what uses of
our
> trademarks we should generally allow/encourage, and for what uses we
> should require people to get explicit permission from us.
> 
> The OSGeo foundation, which is in a loosely comparable situation to us,
has
> the following trademark guidelines (and theirs is, in turn, a shortened
and
> modified version of the Mozilla Foundation's policy):
> 
> http://www.osgeo.org/content/foundation/legal/trademark_guidelines.ht
> ml
> 
> Do you think something similar would work for us? Are there bits in there
> where OSM should be stricter, or more liberal, about trademark use than
> OSGeo?
> 
> Bye
> Frederik
> 
> [*] Trademarks, here, means trademarks we already have or aspire to have
> - basically, our name and logo.
> 
> --
> Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"
> 
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